You Love Me(You #3)(105)
I’m hungry, so I go downstairs to fix a snack. We’re out of eggs so I grab a Hostess Cupcake—RIP Melanda had good taste in junk—and I tear off the wrapper and the cupcake tastes like childhood, like sugar.
And then my phone buzzes. I have one new text message, and that message is from Love Fucking Quinn: We need to talk.
She never writes to me and my legs fill with pins and needles. I put my phone on the counter and no. This is not happening. I’m hallucinating—I should have gone to sleep like you—and my screen is black and maybe I was hallucinating.
But then my phone lights up again. One new email from Love Fucking Quinn.
She’s never texted me and she’s never emailed me but she is the mother of my son. All the worst thoughts flood my mind at once—Forty fell down the stairs, Forty drowned in the pool, Tressa stole Forty—and I grab my fucking phone and I walk outfuckingside and I call Love Quinn on the phone.
The phone rings once and she doesn’t pick up and I see my son in the arms of some pervert who played the Injustice System and got a job at Disneyland. The phone rings again and I see my son with half his face torn off by a Rottweiler—Love trusts bad dogs, I don’t—and the phone rings a third time and I don’t know where my son is right now. Did he just crawl out of an open window in a high-rise in New York City and are my tears from heaven? Did he die without ever getting to meet his own father?
“Well, hello,” she says. “I thought you’d be sleeping.”
“Is Forty all right?
“Aw, I’m good, Joe. Thanks for asking.”
“Is he sick?”
“I think I have new allergies, but I don’t have it in me to get tested. All those needles…”
The level to which I did not miss the sound of her voice… I cut her right off. “Don’t fuck with me. Is my son okay? Yes or no.”
“Joe… He’s fine.”
“Thank God.”
“Well, okay, but maybe more like thank me because I’m the one who actually takes care of him…”
“What’s going on, Love?”
“I sent you an email. I bought you a plane ticket and you’re coming to L.A. tomorrow.”
I say nothing because that’s what she deserves: nothing.
“All right,” she says. “It’s simple, Joe. I need to see you. We need to see you. So I bought you a plane ticket.”
If I ask her to wait until Monday she might hang up on me. I want to see my son. I want to be with you, Mary Kay. My neurons are being torn in half.
“Joe?”
“I’m here.”
“Good. And you’ll be here tomorrow because if you’re not… Well… you’re doing so good with your girlfriend and her daughter. I mean I know you’d hate for them to find out about the family you left behind…”
She knows. How does she know? And she’s doing it again, twisting all the facts, and I want to climb into the phone and choke her out and it’s twenty-fucking-twenty-one and WHY CAN’T WE TELEPORT? I am steady. Breathe, Joe, breathe. “I didn’t leave you, Love.”
“Oh yes you did,” she says. “You got into a car my parents gave you and you drove to a house my parents bought for you and those are the facts. I’m sure you’ve twisted it all in your head to make yourself some kind of victim slash martyr… but I know things. And if you want me to keep my mouth shut… Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Today actually. So you better go back to bed. The car will be there soon.”
She hangs up on me and I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I just die underneath and she is the shark inside my shark. She cut me open and extracted all my secrets. I puke off the side of the deck and I look upstairs and the lights are still out in our bedroom.
I get in my car—a car my parents gave you—and I call Oliver and I get voicemail and I text Oliver—911—and I call again and it’s soothing in some demented way, like knitting while the person you love is in surgery. Finally he picks up. Groggy. “Joe, it’s a little late.”
“What did you tell her?”
“What did I tell who?”
“Love called me, Oliver. She sent me a plane ticket. And we had a fucking deal.”
“Slow down.”
“I bought every piece of art you wanted and you said you had my back. You said you’d keep the Quinns out of the picture.”
“Joe.”
“What?”
“Are you calm?”
“Am I calm? She bought me a fucking plane ticket.”
“And what did you do before that?”
“Oliver, you’ve been stalking me and watching my every fucking move and you know I did nothing.”
He sighs. “First of all, I don’t know anything about a plane ticket.”
“Bullshit.”
“Second of all, if my ex-girlfriend who is the mother of my child was both well-heeled and… well… a little dramatic, I think I’d think twice about bragging about my brand-new fucking make-a-family on a public forum.”
“I did not post a picture of Mary Kay. I only post books.”
But he railroads. “I wouldn’t let the whole world know that I’m in love with a woman and I wouldn’t want my ex to see me playing dad with another family because I’d be smart enough to know that my ex wouldn’t like that, my friend.”